http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/24/news/fortune500/mcdonalds/index.htm?cnn=yes

In Arlington VA at the McDonalds on Columbia Pike, east of Glebe Rd, there is a DVD rental kiosk in the parking lot. I guess they will move them inside now.

Bias is finally shipping SoundSoap Pro. This is the long-awaited big brother to the popular original SoundSoap audio restoration tool.

Visit the Bias site for complete information (http://www.bias-inc.com/products/soundsoappro/).

Having used the original SoundSoap many times I can highly recommend your consideration if you often need to clean-up your audio tracks.

I'm very anxious to find out how well this program works. I may finally have to upgrade to OSX now.

Here is a goodie I found on OfficeMax
Panasonic Camcorder Digital Video Tapes

New Low Price, Was $19.99, now only $5!

Tape Grade: Linear Plus

3 Tapes per Pack


http://www.officemax.com/max/solutions/product/prodBlock.jsp?prodBlockOID=537017729&siteID=isIkAyUyNbM-wuWhUxwJk87zrpDwOMl7hA

Thanks, George. Nice deal at 1/3 the cost of my Panasonic PQ tapes. But they're "consumer" not "professional" rated. Dorothy

I don't know man.

I've got a matrox digisuite le (sd) and it gave me problems for 7 years. Maybe it's cause it's a pc platform, but man . . . I'm never goin matrox again.

George:

Thanks for the tip was it online or in the store?

I know they arnet rated professional, but im always subjective on that due to the fact that my old employer a cable news net used to have those before we went all sony excellence (and I had to start buying tapes :( But they went through more cases than you can imagine and we never had a problem with using those tapes (provided shooting was ok) to air. At 3 for $5 I might just pick up a whole bunch if I can find it at the max near me...

M

Reuters, June 3: " Sony Electronics on Thursday unveiled a new digital projection system for movie theaters at a cost and technology upgrade that rivals market leader Texas Instruments Inc."

A little good old competition is just what's needed to get digital cinema moving at a faster pace.

See the full story at Reuters. (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=5340725)

http://www.info-mica.com/en/index.html

Very interesting featured in Wired this month.
I wonder what this could mean for future video storage.

Sony has a new 12x DVD burner that burns DVDs in 6 minutes. The only bit of information I could find on it is over at www.gamersdepot.com

It is a little expensive for the average prosumer user, though...

http://pro.jvc.com/prof/Attributes/press_res.jsp?tree=&model_id=MDL101225&itempath=&feature_id=08

More on that story

http://www.digitalproducer.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=25993

Sooooo,
this means that a person who's thinking about making his own digital feature could rent one of these and travel with it, showing the finished product himself and save the cost of having it transfered to film. Hmmmmmmm....

Jeff Patnaude

Umm, but they're not that much faster...

http://www.apple.com/

Wouldn't that require 12X media? Isn't the fastest out
now 4X?

A number of people are using 4x media but burning at 8x speed.
I just received my Pioneer A07 burner and will report how it uses my existing stack of Ritek 4x DVD-R.

I was one of the unfortunates who bought the first run of the rt2000 card.

Never again.

For me, software based solutions work very well, and with the ability to setup a render farm, proprietary accellerator cards seem unecessary.

As the HD product lines shake out, I'm hoping to stay with a simple i/o card and software nle.

IN their defense. Part of the problems with Matrox cards was traced to VIA chipsets (266, 333). Matrox finally had to expose them even though they were loath to do so.
Subsequently I seriously doubt if I ever buy another mobo with a VIA chipset on it again. My audio apps were affected to.

Many thought it was AMDs fault. But that cleared up when the 2nd generation of Nividia chipsets came out. LIve and learn is a very expensive outlook on life.

Check this out --

http://www.filmmakerprogram.com/

http://show.vsdahomeentertainment.com/videoshow/V40/index.cvn?id =10030&p_navID=55

Is it just me getting re-directed or did Canon completely re-do it's DV camcorder website?

http://www.canondv.com

Canon did a make over on all there sites several days ago.

My favourite part of the new Canon website is that all of its links to its manuals and docs redirect you to nowhere in particular.

Just like before, there are still more than 60 separate images to load on that main page. I'm glad I'm not on a dial-up, but satellite access isn't much better.

Foveon announces a chip with "variable pixel size technology" for video application.Check out http://www.dpreview.com/news/0406/04062102foveonf19.asp

It indeed seems to support video as well as a cameralink interface,
that's pretty interesting. The sensor is probably quite expensive, though

Was there a mention of an application for a video camera in there someplace? The 1.125-inch size would be too
big for a camcorder, unless it was a large HD type. A huge lens would be needed to get much zoom power with such a large CCD.

I would think there would be a version of the Foveon CCD that was smaller and with fewer pixels, if it was intended for any type of video use, other than ultra-high definition, special use cameras. There was no indication of the refresh or frame-rate that these tri-depth sensors could use. I'm surprised by the slow implementation of the Foveon CCD system, which has been around for several years.
I expected that my next video camera would have been outfitted with one, a couple of years ago. Is there a hidden difficulty in using them for video purposes? Do the three sensing layers use pixel-offsetting?

Lots of questions, but I haven't heard many specific answers, nor have I heard of committments by video manufacturers to use them.

Steve McDonald

The chip isn't that big its just a bit bigger than a 1/2" CCD(1/2 = 0.5, 1/1.8 = 0.5555, 2/3 = .6666) smaller than a 2/3". So lenses could be 1/2" . This is the first in the series that has a low pixel count. I think the others were intended to address the high end still camera market. This chip could be an excellent choice for a HDV camera!!!

Ron Evans

We've actually had several good discussions on the Foveon. One of the most recent was last August (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13093&highlight=foveon). I don't think their situation has materially changed since then. It looks like they are now emphasizing niche markets rather than suggesting that they're headed for mainstream photo and video devices.

I also want to chime in. My friend has gone through 4 Sigma S10 cameras due to spots (dead pixels?) in his pictures. So besides not being ready for main-stream markets, they don't appear to be ready for mass market - period....

Of course this could be a Sigma issue as well.

http://www.shareholder.com/maxtor/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=137366&reltype=Corporate&maxtor_section=press

That is cool. I would like to new 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptors with this SATA II. Hopefully, Maxtor will put out something to compete with WD's 74 GByte Raptor, which goes for about $200. This little drive hauls ! My coworker works on disk drives uses two in Raptors in RAID0 as a boot drive. His motherboard chipset (nVidia nForce3) supports SATA without using the PCI bus Risky, but FAST.

I mistakeningly interpreted the figure "1/1.8" as meaning one and one-eighth inches. This new trend in mixing fractions and decimals to express CCD sizes in what are actually bastardized fractions, is mathematically incorrect and, I believe deliberately confusing. If you used fractional expressions like that on a math test, you'd get an "F".

When a camcorder manufacturer specifies that a model has a 1/4.8th-inch CCD, they're just hoping that many people won't realize that it's actually only
.21 inches and will think instead that it's larger than the 1/4th-inch CCD on the previous year's model. If they insist on going with CCD sizes that can't be expressed by common fractions, why don't they just use pure decimals? A dual expression of, for example,
.55 inches/13.8mm would be best for international products.

Steve McDonald

Actually the whole CCD size issue is more complicated than this. The sizes are not really diagonals of the CCD's, but go back to the vacuum tube days when camera tubes were designated by the diameter of the cylindrical glass tube. The active image area was quite a bit smaller than this (a rectangle within the circle). When CCD imagers cam into use the first ones were sized to correspond to the active image area of a 2/3" cylindrical tube, hence the term 2/3" CCD. Now there never was such a thing as a 1/4" or 1/3" vacuum tube sensor so these sizes just represent the manufacturer's concept of how big the active image area of a 1/4" or 1/3"vacuum tube would have been if it existed.

According to an article I recently read, a 1.25" vacuum tube had an image diagonal 21.4mm, a 1" tube had a 16mm diagonal, and both the 1/2" and 5/8" tubes had 8mm diagonals. Modern camcorder chip sizes include 1/3" CCD's with 6mm diagonals, 1/4" CCD's with 4mm diagonals and 1/6" CCD's with 3mm diagonals.

Two days ago in my local paper (Arizona Republic) in the business section there was an article about a new super chip set being announced by Intel that is supposed to be available this week. The article did not name it or give specs, it said:

1. Giant leap forward in graphics processing, can run full res HD TV in your living room and other programs and monitors at the same time.
2. Major improvements for video editing and gaming.
3. First big step towards Intel’s goal of making the PC the heart of a home’s entertainment center.
4. Not a new processor, works with P4, it is a new chip set.

Has anyone heard anything about this?

Steve

Is this it? - Tom's Hardware Guide: Intel's 775 Launch Mixes Ambition With A Strong Aftertaste (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040619/index.html)

Lots of manufacturers (nVidia, ATI, Via, etc.) are offering motherboard chipsets for AMD and Intel microprocessors.
This Intel chipset is an incremental, not monumental, step
forward.

Now, this Intel part should help reduce the cost of
big TVs :

http://www.intel.com/design/celect/technology/lcos/

Could have implications for DV cam batteries.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1509&ncid=738&e=8&u=/afp/20040624/tc_afp/japan_it_toshiba_company

Though, this article doesn't comation enough information to
accurately convert the specs to camcorder battery units of
milliAmpereHours. Someday, we will kiss those big bricks
and recharge anxieties goodbye.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0406/04062401toshibafuel.asp

"Toshiba's methanol fuel cell"

It will certainly be some time before we see fuel cells used in digital cameras but it's worth noting that development fuel cells is accelerating. Toshiba today announced a small methanol fuel cell which weighs just 8.5 g (0.3 oz) and can produce 100 mW of power. Toshiba describe this new unit as "small enough for integration into a wireless headset for mobile phones, but still efficient enough to power an MP3 music player for as long as 20 hours on a single 2cc charge of highly concentrated methanol. The new fuel cell outputs 100 milliwatts of power, and can continue to do so, non-stop, for as long as users top up its integrated fuel tank—a process that is as simple as it is safe."

Press Release:

Michael,

That review on Tom’s hardware is what the republic was talking about. However Tom's review is reality based. It is beyond me why a major newspaper would make it sound like this was the biggest advance in many years. I wish I still had the article so I could quote it. They made it sound revolutionary.
I have a P4, 3.2 Extreme Edition and a 800 FSB on my system and am very happy with it, the article made it sound outdated already.

Steve

The new Grantsdale/Northwood (915/925) chip sets have some nice built in features, but the big addition is PCI Express. This allows bidirectional high speed data transfer from the graphic card, and will be key for enabling useful coprocessing on the GPU.

There isn't much software out there that takes advantage of this yet, so it's more of a future benefit. The current tests show the new chipset/processor combos to be only slightly faster than the old.

Eliot

The new site does not work as well with Opera and other non-mainstream-browsers as the old page did. You do have to look at the page with Microsoft Internet Explorer and most of the things work... but still, it's quite a shame! :-)